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MiriamWeiner

Through her genealogical program Routes to Roots, Miriam Weiner helped Jews access historical records that had survived the Soviet suppression of information throughout Eastern Europe. Weiner earned a BA in historical studies from Empire State College, SUNY in 1986. For the next two years she served as executive director of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in New York City, where she helped develop a database of Holocaust survivors that is now part of the United States Holocaust Memorial. In 1988, she began investigating her own family tree, and quickly discovered on a trip to Poland that many Jewish records had survived both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. In cooperation with the Polish State Archives, she created an exhaustive index of the remaining records. In 1994, she created the Routes to Roots Foundation which maintains a town-by-town inventory of surviving Jewish and civil records in Eastern European archives. Weiner also organizes customized tours of Eastern European countries and personal archive research for Jews eager to investigate their genealogies via her commercial website, Routes to Roots. From 1987 to 1996 Weiner published a syndicated newspaper column, “Roots and Branches,” as well as two books, Jewish Roots in Poland (1997) and Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova (1999). In 2003, Weiner received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies.